Tears Of The Sun (Cert 15)

Tears Of The Sun has Bruce and his chums sorting out a fictitious but credible civil war in Africa - supposedly Nigeria, but it could be almost anywhere: to me, it looked suspiciously like Hawaii.

Their mission is to rescue an improbably gorgeous doctor (Monica Bellucci), a priest and two nuns. Before long, Bruce realises he's going to have to save several dozen African civilians from being ethnically cleansed.

This is another of those post-9/11 movies, such as We Were Soldiers, which celebrate the American military for bearing what used to be called the white man's burden.

It is recognisably a Bush-era film, for the way it preaches interventionism on humanitarian grounds. Never mind weapons of mass destruction - the world out there is full of bad, freedom-hating aliens who need zapping.

Unsubtle as the message is, there's something curiously liberating about a movie that acknowledges that Africa's biggest problem is not white racism towards blacks, but black racism towards other blacks.

Any film that brings the West closer to doing something about mad, murderous tyrants such as President Mugabe is fine by me.

Writers Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo have a simpleminded approach to characterisation and world politics, but they create just enough twists to keep us guessing what's going to happen next.

Antoine Fuqua, whose last movie was Training Day, directs with pace and a flair for suspense, and shows rather more sensitivity towards the black people on screen than most Hollywood films manage.

The action sequences give a real sense of how it feels to be in the middle of 'ethnic cleansing' and a modern infantry attack.

This is the present-day equivalent of a John Wayne movie, but it's a good yarn, and the production values are top-notch.